


White Is Cold And Always Yearning

by silveradept



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Balthier Learns The Virtue of Silence, F/M, Hair Braiding, Hair Brushing, Love Confessions, Viera Traditions, Year's End, trapped in a cabin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:19:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27957521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveradept/pseuds/silveradept
Summary: A snowstorm traps Fran and Balthier together in a cabin right before year's end, which leaves Fran with very few options on how to perform a year end ritual for the Viera of Eryut. To successfully help his partner, Balthier will have to be able to take both direction and a supporting role. The rewards may be hearing what he's always wanted to hear from Fran.
Relationships: Balthier/Fran (Ivalice Alliance)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11
Collections: Mistletoe Exchange 2020





	White Is Cold And Always Yearning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Welsper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Welsper/gifts).



"Well," Balthier says, looking out the window, "that will most likely cover our escape, but I fear it will also keep us here for a while. You have been encouraging me to take more time away from work," he adds cheerily as he closes the window coverings, allowing the snow flurrying outside to continue its work while he attends to the work of what is inside. They'll be comfortable enough, with food and warmth, to wait out the snowfall and then move on to the next job that awaits them.

"Balthier." Fran's voice is stern, but not the stern that indicates he's gone too far into his role.

"Yes?" he replied, turning to her. The "my love" is silent. Fran knows it is there, but acknowledging it, even if it she never intends to return it, would mean their partnership has grown into something beyond their arrangements. Balthier knows that even though Fran no longer says she is part of the Wood, there is some part of her that wishes to be reconciled to it before the end of her life. Balthier suspects she may have to outlive Jote to do it, but Balthier has every confidence that Fran can, assuming she doesn't do things like bringing a Hume with her and saying that he gets to live in Eruyt. Their grudges last longer than Hume ones do, and patience comes as easily as breathing to a Viera. 

"You are not sleeping on the _Strahl_ tonight," Fran said, leaving no room for any disagreement with her.

"Wouldn't dream of it," Balthier replied, airy and light as if the matter had only now just crossed his mind, rather than being his plan ever since they had landed at this hideout. They were comfortable enough with each other to bathe together, they had spent nights at inns and houses and castles in the same room with each other, and they had worked together in very intimate jobs that had required them to play the part of two people hopelessly in love with each other, but for Fran's sake, Balthier tried to express his feelings for her only in ways she could deny had anything to do with romance. Like making sure she always had the beds because he didn't want her cramping from trying to compress herself into a Hume-sized bed.

"I…will require your assistance tonight," Fran continued.

"What do you need?" Balthier said, matching her seriousness with his own.

"Preferably, you would be able to fall asleep while sitting and maintaining an attentive pose," Fran said. "Since you do not have that skill, I will need you to do two things you are not accustomed to: listen silently and forget what you hear."

"Fran?" Balthier asked, letting his concern color his tone to familiarity rather than business partnership. "Are you all right?"

"The year is ending, Balthier. The Green Word calls us all to account, even those of us who no longer hear the Wood. I must cast my words into the Mist."

"There isn't a Jagd near here," Balthier said. "And, forgive me, but sending my partner away to somewhere to get Mist-frenzied seems the opposite of what a leading man would do."

Fran gave him no reply, but instead began to pull her hair back through the head armor she wore. Once she had done so, it was the matter of a moment to pull the head armor over her ears and place it carefully on one of the tables along the side of the cabin. The tie she used to create the simple ponytail that contained most of her hair soon joined it on the table. Hair unbound, Fran set two chairs close to each other and then searched her pack until finding the brush she had recently bought from one of the other Viera they had met on their travels. Handing him the brush, Fran sat in the first chair, her back to Balthier, making sure all of her hair laid loose over the back of the chair.

Arranging himself behind Fran in the second chair, Balthier realized he had very little idea how quickly Fran's hair grew. She usually asked Penelo to help her with styling, not that Fran needed it, but it was a good opportunity for Penelo to indulge her curiosity and for Fran to mentor and impart advice to the young sky pirate, in much the same way Balthier occasionally took Vaan under his wing for an operation or two.

"From the bottom first," Fran said, providing Balthier with the information he needed to begin. Gently gathering a handful of the starkly white hair, Balthier applied the brush, working through unexpected tangles and snarls as they arose with what he hoped was the right balance of finesse and strength.

"Mist-frenzy is best for pulling the words out," Fran said when he was about a third of the way up. "When enraged, we are more likely to speak necessary words, even if not to those who must hear them."

"And easier to deny their truth afterward," Balthier said. Without looking behind her, Fran plucked the brush from him, gently rapped him on the head, and put the brush back in his hands.

"Listen silently," Balthier reminded himself.

"Do not make this difficult," Fran said. Balthier resumed his work, paying attention to the spaces where trying to pull the brush through threatened to pull Fran's head, even if only gently. The sudden intimacy of brushing her soft and very long hair worried Balthier even as he enjoyed being able to be close to Fran and to do this service for her.

After some time, and working through a particularly tricky knot, Fran began to speak again. "The Wood has abandoned me to the world. I left many years ago, and I do not regret my decision, but every day I feel its absence. When we returned, I worried that I might not feel it again, and despaired that it would feel like coming home after a long journey, patient and loving and curious for tales of the world outside."

Neither of those things had been the case, by Balthier's estimation, but he had felt like the conflict between Fran, Jote, and Mjrn they had witnessed was the surface and underneath lay a much older and deeper disagreement. Asking Fran for those details would have been an exercise in futility, not that it had stopped Vaan from trying, but Balthier understood how home could be both the place you remembered fondly and the place you couldn't wait to leave.

"It was not home," Fran continued. "But I returned to find that while the Wood has been rejecting me since I left, I had begun to reject the Wood in return, because I could no longer imagine happiness solely through reconciliation."

Fran appeared to be considering her next words as Balthier continued to brush, using longer strokes to return all the way to the end from the place he was brushing from. He wanted to ask Fran so much, but she had asked for his silence. He began to wonder what she would say that required the other part of the promise, to forget.

"To be happy in the Wood, I would have to bring someone not of the Wood with me. And I would not let him go away with the males, never to be seen again, but I would keep him with me all the time."

Balthier hoped his hands didn't hitch as much as he had thought they did. While it was not a guarantee that Fran was talking about him specifically, he couldn't call to mind anyone else that Fran had spent enough time with to consider keeping in Golmore with her.

"This one carries the sky in his blood."

Scratch the ambiguity, then, Balthier thought.

"If I took him to the Wood and kept him, and the Wood welcomed me home as it does a lost child, I would no longer need to seek anything more from the world."

Balthier stopped brushing. He hadn't consciously decided to; the shock of hearing how he could make Fran happy for the rest of her life ran through both his mind and body.

"I could not keep him there," Fran continued, reaching behind herself to continue brushing with his hands while he processed what she was saying. "The call of the sky, of the world beyond, it is still alive with him. The Wood would be a cage, as much as he would deny it."

Seeing Fran happy and being with her would make most prisons bearable, even if he were the only Hume among the Viera. They would eventually come around to accepting him as a part of their lives, as Fran had. It would be a performance befitting a leading man of his stature.

He would sacrifice so much to see her happy again.

"He would willingly give up the sky for me," Fran said. "But if I were to try and keep him, I would only lose him, and if I lost him, I would give up the Wood to go find him again."

Balthier reached the top of Fran's head and began brushing the full length of Fran's hair. There were no knots left to untangle between them.

"Thank you," Fran said, taking the brush from Balthier and putting it back in her pack. "At the dawning of the new year, my sisters and I would braid each other's hair, each plait representing one more year of life passed. We would wear the braid until all of the plaits fell out. I wish my hair braided for this new year."

"How shall I proceed, then?" Balthier asked.

"Start at the top and continue until there is no more hair, then tie off the bottom," Fran said. "There will not be enough, but it will be acceptable."

"As you wish," Balthier said, and set to the task of wrapping all the hair he had just brushed. As his hands worked, his mind turned over what Fran had just said to him and what responses he could give to her to say that he wouldn't mind spending the rest of his life in Golmore, so long as he had her with him for the whole time.

"Fran—" he began.

"What you heard was born of Mist, spoken by one in Mist-frenzy, and given to the Mist to take as its own," Fran said sharply. "To believe there is truth in it is folly."

The second of Fran's instructions replayed in Balthier's mind. But how could he forget the thing he had most desired to hear for so long? All he would have to do is—

"Recognize my role," he murmured as the realization arrived. He'd told Vaan repeatedly that Fran was far wiser than anyone gave her credit for, and it would be foolish to think of himself as exempted from that. Brilliant, wonderful, beautiful Fran. She'd asked him to play a supporting role, but she'd already set the stage perfectly before asking him. A snowstorm to trap them together on the last conceivable night to perform before the new year. A ritual that is specifically about saying the things she can't say in any other context, with the insistence that such things cannot be taken as true or real. And explicit instructions to listen and forget, so that he could not question her and unravel the plot.

She'd found a way to give him plausible deniability, and what she needed from him was to play his part. She didn't want him to forget, but she also didn't want him to pursue it. She still had the sky in her blood, as well, and it was his job to make sure she could express it.

His hands finished braiding her hair, then put the hair tie she had taken off at the start of the process on the end to hold the plaits in place. Fran gently patted her way down the braid, then nodded in satisfaction.

"Born of Mist, spoken in Mist, as substantial as Mist," he said. "Already forgotten."

"Good," she replied, favoring him with a smile, then leaning down to kiss him on the forehead. "We must keep clear heads if we are to do our work effectively."

"Of course," Balthier said. "It would not do for either of us to return to the Mist with anything unspoken."

The look Fran gave him was both confirmation of his suspicions and a warning that he was too close to saying something that could not be unsaid.

"Since we will be here for some time, Balthier," she told him, changing the subject, "you will be able to help me with crafting our welcome for the new year."

"I'm curious to see what wood we're going to be braiding together this year," Balthier said. "We traversed quite a bit of the world while saving it, and there were some quite rare trees to select from."

"When the storm subsides, we can go to the _Strahl_ and collect the materials ," Fran said. "For now, I am tired. Come join me. There are enough beds for both of us to sleep comfortably."

"Of course," Balthier said, smiling. He would hope that at some point, Fran would invite him into the same beds that she was using, but for now, he would treasure the confessions she had thrown to the Mist.


End file.
